Re-designed UI/UX Increases Conversion Rate by 3%

About Taj Hotels

With a major part of IHCL, Taj Hotels are the hallmark of renowned hospitality around the globe, occupying a range of true living palaces, landmark hotels, resorts, and safaris. One of the pioneers in the  Indian hospitality sector, the brand is known for its comfortable and warm service. Tourists and guests from all over the world enjoy comfort in the regal, elegantly designed rooms at the Taj which offer beautiful views of the destination and efficient in-room amenities.

Challenge

The most significant part of any website is its search page.

Search bars are strategically placed to ensure transparency and productivity. If the search page is not working properly, it indicates a gap between the user and the brand.

In the quest to increase conversion rate, one of the major challenges was to keep customers engaged on a website. Another challenge was to persuade customers to buy something even if it isn’t exactly what they want when they visit the page.

The hotel business is driven by search inquiries. Hence, our task was to make the mobile search experience as simple as possible from the web page. To obtain more engagement and customers down the funnel, we sought to enhance the search related to suites and rooms. We observed that the numbers in terms of searches/total users on the site weren’t satisfactory; so we decided to walk into the customer’s shoes and brainstorm ideas to increase the conversion rate.

Solution

We conducted qualitative and quantitative conversion research and focused our attention on the website’s most valuable section. To detect conversion rate challenges on the site, the team ran a rigorous conversion audit.

Expert evaluations, user research, data analysis, and usability testing were all part of the audit. The team discovered the pain points and a number of new revenue and innovation possibilities.

As you can see in the above image, we changed the whole search section to make it more appealing.

The team categorized the issues using the prioritization framework to determine which issues would have the most impact on the bottom line but require the least amount of effort.

Testing Methodology

In the Search option section, many elements required changes and alterations. Thus, as per our understanding and the client’s needs, we made sure to implement the relevant changes and highlight other elements to bring more opportunities and boost conversion rate.

In the heatmap below, you can see the before and after effects with changes in the main metrics.

•  The Search Bar

We hypothesized and highlighted the search bar. For ‘Click on Search’ we saw a massive +89% improvement in the click rate for search. This led to increase in conversion rate by 5.85%.

•  Country Option

Next, we also changed the display for the ‘Country’ option which has a drop-down button. Making change in the clicks for the country option, we saw an improvement of +50%.

•  Filter By Option

Another change that we made was on the ‘Filter By’ option. We wanted to make user search easy by making the filter option easily accessible and noticeable. This led to the click on the ‘Filter By’ option to improve by +46% and increase in conversion rate with 6.70%.

•  Show Map Option

In the control context, the ‘Show Map’ option was noticeable which we did not want because we wanted the customers to add value to the search section by interacting with the entire page.

Thus, we made sure that the Show map metric dropped by -25% to reduce the user interaction with it.

•  Room & Suites Page 

We wanted users to visit room and suite listing pages and check for the rooms at their convenience. This was possible with the above metrics that we changed and led to a +1% increase in the visits to the ‘Room & Suites’ page.

•  Cart Page

It has also been noticed that with the change in the position of various options and metrics, the cart page variation has received a +2% increase in visits and 0.17% increase in conversion rate.

End Result

The test ran for 48 days with variations, and traffic was distributed equally among the variation and the control. From the observed data, we could see that the Variation showed a high probability of being better than the Control in a mobile. We were successful in achieving our goal from this test as the overall user interaction improved and also the overall conversion rate increased by 3%. We also saw a 26% increase in revenue.